We like this! Fancy that…

[Video]
[8.06]
Alex Clifton: PinkPantheress feels like the light coming off a disco ball: chill, muted and glittery. And it works so well. I can play “Tonight” on a loop and end up with an endless party that somehow never bores me. It’s bouncy and flirty, PinkPantheress has a lovely and cool voice, and the production is top-tier. I’ve bemoaned the decline of bridges this week in a couple other reviews—at this point I’m convinced Taylor Swift hid the instructions on bridge-writing from other songwriters—but here I think it actually works out pretty well. “Tonight” relies on this constant, pulsating energy, whereas I think a bridge would break up the party a bit prematurely. I don’t go clubbing anymore (I’m in my thirties and always tired) but I’ll gladly have my own private PinkPantheress dance party in the kitchen.
[8]
William John: Scene: the club. You’re in the thick of it; a fan is helping to dry out the sweat that’s beading on your forehead. There’s a rubbery bassline completely enveloping you. Then someone’s saying – singing? – something; it could be the surrounding noise, or the fact that you’re so caught up in your own euphoria, but it’s mostly unintelligible, though you sort of catch the word “superstar” a couple of times, and when you do, you feel your stomach do a little somersault. You lean in and ask them to repeat what they’d been saying, just as the beat quickens and begins to resemble a church bell removed of all reverberation. The reply you get is surprisingly forthright. “You want sex with me? Come talk to me,” they say, twirling effusively, and you don’t know whether to shut your eyes and start breathing heavily, or to open them as widely as possible. I indulge here in this semi-invented vignette to illustrate that while Pinkpantheress might, historically, have been parsed as a bedroom artist – she did start out anonymously, after all – “Tonight” is as vivid and hyperreal a song about partying as can be conceived; it’s a three minute reality show about dancefloors and all the baggage attached thereto, and as soon as the sampled string opening ends and the beat kicks in, no matter where I am listening to it, all I can see are strobing lights. The track is epic in length by her standards, but still short enough to seem like it’s over just after it’s started; she manages to run us through hedonism’s full gamut in a way that’s both pithy and extraordinarily detailed. Her anxious delivery through the verses contrasts with her punctuating every other line with nonchalant “like what?”s, demonstrating that sometimes, at the party, all you need to do to turn that tension into frisson is smile and offhandedly flick your hair.
[10]
Mark Sinker: The loop of “like what?” is the focused essence of PP. Breathy glide-and-build, distractedly fashioned from very nearly nothing and all the better for it.
[9]
Jel Bugle: I like the conversational approach PinkPantheress takes to her vocals — it’s like she is talking on her phone at a club or something. Others will talk about her samples and inspirations; I know nothing of such things.
[7]
Al Varela: “Tonight” opens with the strings of a Panic! At The Disco sample that eventually burst into galactic synths and an infectious bounce, blasting you into the song like you’re going into hyperspace. The atmosphere and vibe of “Tonight” is ridiculously immersive, a bliss to listen to both on headphones and pumping out huge speakers. PinkPantheress is the perfect vocalist for this type of song too. Soft spoken and sweet, but with enough of a unique tone and assertiveness to her that she still stands out even within the suffocatingly rich instrumental. She’s the life of the party and she’s living up every moment of it. I heard this song being played on the dance floor of a queer party not long after it came out. That’s how you know this is a classic in the making.
[10]
Ian Mathers: Given the number of samples on the new PinkPantheress that make me feel very sickos.jpg, it’s kind of a shame for me personally that the single is the one that did not have me hooting and hollering (no offense to Panic! At the Disco fans). She samples Basement Jaxx three times! “Illegal” is basically just a big chunk of “Dark & Long (Dark Train Mix)”! But I wouldn’t like those tracks as much either if what she was bringing to the source material wasn’t compelling in its own right. Her approach works as well, or better, for horniness as it ever did for sadness.
[8]
Kayla Beardslee: This is a PinkPantheress Song (TM). PinkPantheress Songs (TM) are generally not my cup of tea, but “Tonight” is cute and bubbly (and long) enough that bits of it have been slipping into my head for several weeks, uninvited but definitely not unwelcome. Right now it’s a perfect [7], but give me another two months and I might decide that it’s an [8]. To this Pantheress skeptic, though, “Stateside” is the real story of her mixtape (and among its many successes, on that song I’m not absolutely befuddled by whatever she’s trying to sing in the verses).
[7]
Iain Mew: “Stateside” worked its cross-Atlantic dynamic with a “Freak Like Me” sample and a pointed gap where a reference to “American Boy” might have gone in an alternate universe. For “Tonight” PinkPantheress carries on the same conversation in unlikely fashion by sampling from Panic! at the Disco’s Pretty Odd, the most Britpop-indebted American album ever. Which is cool and also one tiny detail of many, just part of the textural background to a portrayal of moment-to-moment mutual infatuation that’s like Charli XCX’s “What I Like” if it played even more on being simultaneously chill and frantic. “You can ruin my makeup […] you can even ruin my life”.
[8]
Julian Axelrod: PinkPantheress has such a good ear for the tiny details that elevate a song from catchy to transcendent. Sometimes they’re just accent pieces, like the mood-setting Panic! at the Disco sample that probably accounts for 20% of her mixtape budget. But the most integral elements are the pieces of her perma-fried brain that get mixed into the melange. I’ve heard big-budget pop albums that don’t have a single hook stickier than the way Pink says, “Like wha?” She gets away with songs this short because she makes every second count.
[8]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: She’s graduated out of aural wallpaper entirely. This is PinkPantheress as fully operational pop superstar, studded with so many hooks that she tosses off great ones — the way she says “like what?” between lines alone! — as if she doesn’t even need them. If I read this too closely, analyzing it forensically versus any of her previous work, I’m not sure I would find that many changes of note; perhaps the bassline is more insistent, the tempo and intensity dialed up by a few ticks. Instead, the triumph of “Tonight” is only recognizable when you zoom out and give yourself away to its groove, the thrilling alchemy of desire and uncertainty that she manages to communicate with understated charm.
[9]
Nortey Dowuona: The voice that slides between the bass squelches is engineered by PinkPantheress herself, and is often sheltered by filters and reverb, but neatly compressed throughout. Each take is either propped up in obvious cuts and overlapping directly into the next, especially for the pre chorus, or simply skids through the top of the mix all tranquil. There’s the customary Melodyneing, making the lead vocals feel so smooth on the eardrum, there’s slightly panned and lowered adlibs that pop out just beyond your ear, there’s the backgrounds lowered 3 semitones swaddling her chorus vocals. All takes thus spark little moments of bliss, each perfectly inserted and arranged to not quash the sleek rhythm Pantheress composes with Count Baldor, Aksel Arvid and PHIL. Thank u Nickie Jon Pabon; your dedication is noticed. Now if only you could mix Jack Harlow’s lead just a bit lower…
[9]
Claire Davidson: On a website that primarily covers pop music, is it hypocritical to complain of a song’s ephemerality? Perhaps, but the best pop at least aims to capture something in the zeitgeist, to compel the listener to remain engaged in its emotional landscape, no matter how familiar. PinkPantheress understands her craft, and it’s tough not to be allured by “Tonight.” The song’s bubbly, house-adjacent groove simmers beneath her sweet paeans to a distant lover, the musical equivalent of cheekily batting one’s eyelashes. I have some quibbles with her delivery—her softer enunciation doesn’t lend itself well to the faster verses’ flow—but I admire the song’s subtle bait-and-switch in how PinkPantheress swerves from passive pining to assertive control, almost daring her prospective partner not to show up for the affair she’s planning that night. Yet “Tonight” operates at such a cool remove that, while I can admire the song’s siren call from afar, I’m hardly ever enthralled by it, despite the urgent passion you’d think the song’s subject matter would inspire. Whether that’s a testament to the PinkPantheress approach or an indictment of it depends on perspective; personally, I like my pop music a little more intense.
[7]
Alfred Soto: I’ve heard the dance beat and keyboard in the first 15 seconds in some variation in Miami bars for 25 years, and when PinkPantheress enters with her high scratch-whisper she sounds like she AI-ed herself. That’s fine. Some performers sound most themselves when most anonymous.
[6]
Katherine St. Asaph: Pink’s voice has a crystalline quality that really suits this kind of frosted-glass house. If anything, she could stand to be more anonymous here.
[8]
Leah Isobel: What is a PinkPantheress song without the juicy layers of psychodrama? Not bad, it turns out!
[7]
Taylor Alatorre: Don’t get it twisted; PinkPantheress knows the score. At any given moment she is acutely aware of her music’s place in the pop landscapes of past and present, hence her mostly feigned sensitivity over the trivial issue of song length. Also hence her 2023 song “True romance,” a straight-up teen groupie fantasy about a famous musician whom the singer has been a fan of “since 2004” (Victoria Walker was born in 2001. Take her seriously, not literally). It’s the existence of that song which makes “Tonight” that much less ambiguous in its tables-turned, all-glowed-up narrative, stripping any metaphorical gloss from the line about posters in her bedroom. She references P!ATD and Kings of Leon without deferring to either, and she giddily tries on a skeevy male rock star mode of businesslike flirtation, or at least her imagined version of it. The song is less about sex than its intertwining with celebrity, and how newly acquired fame can enable the crossing of status boundaries once thought impermeable. This crossing is not frictionless, however, despite the volley of coquettish interjections and hopscotch basslines that are meant to fool you otherwise. The object of affection may be a “superstar,” but the narrator still fears she is not, because what sort of superstar would admit to vomiting before a casual rendezvous? Still, she soldiers on regardless, her voice betraying fear and confidence in equal measure, her echoed “yeah”s serving as nimble reminders of an ideally charming self. Likewise, PinkPantheress herself soldiers on, almost certainly aware of how the chorus of “Tonight” can and will be heard by some listeners as a sexual come-on to them, thereby securing her own role in this unbroken libidinal chain of pop idoldom. You could even ruin her life (well, not you, though).
[8]